Diversifying Income Series: Mastering Brand Partnerships with Candice Ward

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. You spend a lot of time on your blog content from planning to recipe testing, to writing, to promoting, but do you know if each of your posts are bringing you the most traffic they possibly can? With Clariti, you can see information about each and every post, which is automatically synced from WordPress, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console so that you can make well-educated decisions about where your existing content may need a little attention. Think broken links or broken images, no internal links or missing alt text. You can also use information that Clarity pulls about sessions, page views, and users to fuel the creation of new content because you’ll be able to see which types of posts are performing best for you. Get access to keyword ranking, click-through rate, impressions, and optimization data for all of your posts today with Clariti listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I i.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back Candace Ward from the Food blog Eat More Cake. This episode is part three of our diversifying income series, and this week we’ll be exploring the topic of brand partnerships. Candace is really an expert when it comes to cultivating brand partnerships as a food creator, and in this episode she shares her three pillar approach to building brand relationships. She talks about crafting a strong offer, how to get more eyeballs on that offer, and then most importantly, learning how to confidently sell it. She shares really practical tips for how to use your analytics to evolve your offerings for brand, how to develop a process and an email sequence to help reach out to brands and make it part of your regular workflow and how to pitch brands with a purpose. This episode is such an awesome guide for those who are looking to start reaching out to brands for those who are looking to level up their relationships with brands or just anyone who is looking to diversify their income beyond ad revenue. I can’t recommend it more highly, and so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Candice, welcome back to the podcast.

Candice Ward: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about ways to diversify your income. It’s this little mini series that we’re doing and it’s important because there’s a lot of things that are shifting in this world of content creation, online business, online business building. I just got off a call with a group of people that I’m a part of, and it was like the exact same thing. We’re talking about all of these different ways that the business is so different than it was five years ago, three years ago, even two years ago, and one of the things that comes out of that is this need to make sure that we’re diversifying our sources of income, that we’re being smart about how we’re creating income from our business so we don’t have a one-legged stool, that we’re looking at all the different ways that we could approach business and create income from business. So before we do that, talk about the different ways we can do that. Let’s talk about your analysis of some of the threats that exist within the world of content creation and content businesses right now.

Candice Ward: Yeah, it’s changed a lot for everybody, and I think I’ve kind of identified three main challenges that we’re having going into 2025 that started evolving probably in 2023 and then a little bit more in 2024. The most obvious is the rise of ai. It’s changing rapidly and quickly, and I think a lot of us are struggling to even understand how to best utilize it in our business, but also just being able to protect our business, especially if we identify as a photographer, for example, how do we protect our images, and then how do we stay relevant to brands when even for them, AI is changing the way that they not only work with content creators, but how they leverage content creators in their business, how they’re searching for content creators. There’s so many different nuances. So that’s the first one. The second one is just the increased competition. There’s a lot more food bloggers out there. There’s a lot more food photographers. There’s in general, a lot more content creators that have emerged in the last few years, partly because it is easier to become one, and so the barriers to entry are just much lower, and so it’s easier for people to go

Bjork Ostrom: Out. There’s no friction in the way that there was 15 years ago to spin up a website to start a social following. Yep,

Candice Ward: Exactly. Yeah, and I think part of that too is the rise of UGC and brands being able to get content for less expensive as well. So I think we’re seeing just a lot of, can you talk

Bjork Ostrom: About that a little bit? So what is UGC and then yeah, that concept.

Candice Ward: Sure. So UGC is user generated content. So the thought is that the brand is taking a video that you create that looks organic as though you are a organic user of their product, but essentially they’re using it as ads and they are working with a lot of content creators that don’t necessarily have experience, and this is not just in the food space, it goes for any industry. I think we’re really seeing it kind of taken off in the beauty industry or product industries where they’re able to showcase the product in use, but it’s still very much applies to the food industry as well. And so the thought is you really don’t have to have a lot of experience as a video creator or even as a photographer, digital creator, creator, as long as you know how to write a really compelling scripted ad and show the product in use and where it looks organic. So I think that’s been a challenge. I mean, it’s also I think an opportunity for us, but brands essentially are able to find people to do it cheaper. So that’s one aspect of it. And then there’s always going to be the sponsored content, and that’s really where you’re creating content that is going on and targeting your audience. You’re posting it to your social channels or to your website, and they’re paying you for access to your audience essentially. So that’s the biggest difference between the two.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that makes sense. So we have these three things that are happening within the industry. There’s always change, and one of the things I love about your story is you have had multiple iterations of your business and you as well have diversified your income starting out and being a baker, correct me if I’m wrong on this, baker in the wedding industry, corporate job in sales, and then pivoting into food photography, focusing on your blog, and then also now having out of that, doing a course and educating bloggers on working with brands. And so you’ve seen the need and have reacted to multiple different iterations based on changing industries and have had success coming out of that, which I think is a validation for you to be able to speak to this because you’ve seen it, you’ve experienced it. So can you just speak to that a little bit in terms of your story and having to go through the process of not only potentially diversifying where your income is coming from, but also evolving based on a changing economic situation?

Candice Ward: I think a lot of us in 2020, we probably either started our business or pivoted our business during those years. I started out making wedding cakes. It was honestly in 20 18, 20 19, and I was also working a sales career and ended up leaving my sales career when the pandemic hit. I mean it was within months of it happening, and I said, I’m going all in on the wedding industry. And then of course the pandemic hit and people were getting married.

So I had to essentially say, okay, how can I make money now with the way that things have changed? And I decided to focus on food photography and to also grow my blog, I had already been posting recipes just for fun to my website. So I decided to focus on those two areas. And then two years into it, I decided to kind of merge my experience as really my background in sales and helping food creators, land brand partnerships, which kind of evolved into me creating a coaching program, but then a digital course because I went on maternity leave and I said, how can I support my coaching clients while I am not able to? So I created an online course and really through that, so it kind of all naturally evolved, but through that I started to see, okay, now I have about three to four different revenue streams in my business, and I definitely have seasons, as we all know with brand partnerships, they tend to be the second half of the year, there tends to be more opportunity Q3, Q4, the demands just a little bit higher for brands to use their marketing budget and also just the need for holiday content.

And so I started seeing these seasons in my business and I was like, how can I backfill that with other revenue streams? So essentially my plan now is during the slower seasons, maybe Q1, so January, February, March, I am mostly launching my digital products, and that’s where my focus is because I’m not as lucrative with brand partnerships during that time. And that’s not to say everybody’s business will operate that way. Some people, if they’re in the healthcare niche or the health niche, if that’s where their blog is focused on, maybe January is the perfect time because everybody’s all about being healthy and New year’s resolution. So it depends on your business and what you offer. But I’m a dessert blogger, so nobody wants desserts in January. So that’s kind of where I started identifying these gaps and seasons in my business where I could add additional revenue streams.

And it’s just really important because when one revenue stream is not performing for you, you have others to fall back on. And I talk about this all the time. In order to really have, and this is what I’m most passionate about teaching is having a stable business stability as a content creator is really difficult and stressful because we often put our eggs in one basket and we are so focused because there’s so much that goes into one aspect of our business, growing a blog and creating content that we really get burnt out. And we don’t think beyond that because we only have capacity really for maybe one at a time, but I want to show people that it’s easy and it doesn’t have to be difficult to add on additional revenue streams. You just have to start and then it will kind of evolve and build on itself.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So I think people can understand not only some of the threats within the industry, I think people feel the presence of AI in a very real way competition. It’s obvious it’s never been more easier to create a social account or to create a website and start to publish to that. And then also this reality of traffic, at least traffic as a source from Google or even social platforms, is probably trending down more than it’s trending up. It doesn’t mean that people have less attention on the internet. I don’t know statistically, but my bet would be that people are spending more time on the internet, not less,

Candice Ward: But

Bjork Ostrom: My bet would also be that people are spending less time on websites, not more. And so taking that into consideration, we have a mechanism to capture the value of people who consume content for free on a website fairly well. It’s working with an ad network like IV Mediavine, and they will monetize the traffic that you’re getting to your website. But a lot of times what we’ve found is people will have a really strong following or platform like email, Instagram, TikTok, and the mechanism they’re using to capture the value on those platforms isn’t as locked in as display ads. There’s more opportunity to capture the value that’s being created on these social platforms. And I think a great first step into that is partnering with brands. So do you have any thoughts on that and how that ties in this shift in how people are spending their attention as it relates to brand partnerships and diversifying your income out of just maybe traditional display ads or not out of, but in addition to

Candice Ward: In addition? Yeah. Yeah. I love that you’re mentioning that because I think we have been conditioned to think this is the only way we can make money as a food blogger, because that’s how it started. And it’s really scary and hard to think how can we now evolve what we do and how we monetize. And for me, I look at three main pillars of business. So the first is looking at your offer, which is obviously we have a food blog. There’s other things that we offer apart from recipes. We have to think of ourselves as digital creators, not just we’re food bloggers and we create recipes on a website. So that’s the first thing is how we identify our offer. The second thing is how we market that offer. And then the third is how do we sell that offer? And I think a lot of us focus on what our offer is, how we market it, but we completely neglect how do we sell that. So marketing really is just how do you get more eyeballs right on your website or your social channels?

But then it’s like how do we bridge the gap of, okay, great, we have more eyeballs on it, but now we need to actually make money. And of course ad revenue is one aspect of that, but another one that’s just really being neglected is brand partnerships. I think that’s completely evolved in the last five years as well. But there’s so many other ways that brands want to partner with us outside of social media and we have to think how can we monetize our audience in different ways? And I think we’ve seen this rise of paid partnership or paid membership sites or segmenting our email list to be able to tailor what we offer to a segment of our email list that may need something for maybe a specific dietary need or really just fulfilling whatever our audience’s problems are and being able to create digital products to serve that or membership sites.

And this is another way that we can work with brands apart from social media because one of the other challenges we’ve been having is social media is a lot of us rely on it almost too much. And it’s really difficult and stressful because we have no control over the algorithm and a lot of us are seeing decreased engagement. So what we do have control over is our website, at least we own it and our email list, we own that. So I want people to think of ways that we can monetize in that regard. And brand partnerships fall under email marketing because you’re directly reaching out via email. And not only that, studies have shown that email marketing or sending a direct email, if you compare it to other marketing strategies, if you compare it specifically to social media, it’s 40 times more effective. There’s studies by really reputable like Forbes and Business Insider that shown it’s way more effective than relying on social media.

And then sending a direct email is three times faster, meaning you can actually directly convert that into sales three times faster than using social media. So I really want people to think, how can I make money faster in a way that doesn’t feel salesy so that we can really free up time to do what we love, which is being creative. And so very much part of that falls under brand partnerships, but those three pillars, your offer, marketing and your sales, they all need to evolve together. And I think we’re at this kind of change in the road where we’re like, some of us are like, ah, okay, maybe my ad revenue’s not enough anymore. Now how do I evolve my offer? But we need all three of those to evolve together in order to have a really stable business.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I would assume part of it is it’s evolving what you view your business as to not just be your website, but anywhere that you have attention on the internet or off the internet. We’ve talked with people who have done brand sponsorships that are events.

Candice Ward: It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Like where do you have attention? And for some people they might have a really strong email list, but also for some people they might have a really great Instagram following or they might be really good, I just saw an article on Tasty. And Tasty is building a WhatsApp following anywhere that you have attention, you can speak to an influence, hence the word influencer, a group of people in a certain direction. It could be trying to get them to traffic to your website, it could be trying to get them to buy your own product, or it could be encouraging them to purchase a product from a brand partnership that you have. I think conceptually we understand that and all of us as creators probably understand where our most valuable platforms are. We might forget some of ’em. We can talk about email as an example. Like, oh, this is a place that people will pay for you to show up for you to have their brand show up as they’re sending out emails. So we can talk about some of those other platforms. But I think the point is, and what we need to be reminded of is anywhere that you have attention, you can influence people.

But then the hard part as creators who are really good at creating and really good at getting that attention is spinning up a new process adjacent to that where you are convincing brands that their money spent with you will be a valuable return for them. And that’s sometimes a scary and hard thing to do. Scary because it feels like sales and marketing and we’re not good at that. We’re really good at creating free content and putting that out to the world. We’re not as good at sales and marketing generally speaking, or we maybe think that we aren’t, but I think a lot of us probably are. And then it’s a new process. It’s an unfamiliar thing, it’s an unfamiliar journey to go through and you’ve laid it out here as offer marketing and then sales, but let’s break each one of those down to make sure that we have an understanding of what each one of those is. So when you say offer, what does that mean

As a content creator, I think a lot of us maybe have an idea of what an offer is, but as it relates to brand partnerships, you as a creator are creating content and you want to capture some of the value that you are creating as money for your business. And one of the ways that you want to do that is working with a brand who will pay you to get some of that attention. How do we think about crafting an offer to put in front of a brand as the first step in this three step process?

Candice Ward: Yeah, I mean that’s the hardest part for most of us is thinking how do I even reach out to a brand and position what I do to be different than what somebody else does? And it’s a little bit scary. So our offer is what it is that we do, right? Your website, your recipes, but again, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of different places that we are maybe performing outside of just our website or social media. Maybe you have a strong YouTube channel or you have a large email list, different ways that you can then monetize. So when we’re talking about offer, you can easily just think, okay, how do I take what I’m already doing and how do I stretch that even further? So let’s just get back to the basics. Let’s say you only have one revenue stream. You’re a food blogger, you rely on ad revenue and you are really stressed because right now your traffic is dipping.

And what most people do is they react to that and they’re like, how do I fix the problem? How do I get more traffic to my website? That’s one area that you can focus on, but another area is let’s create a completely new thing that you’re doing. And again, just using the content that you already have, how can you stretch that even further? So if you are in, my example was I’m in the dessert space, so if that’s my niche, how can I then go maybe and pull my audience either on Instagram or pull my audience through my email list and ask them a series of questions of what are their biggest challenges, what are they struggling with? How can I then create a digital product? Let’s say my audience comes back and says, I really struggle with making cakes for an event because it’s really time consuming, but I want to make a layered cake.

I just don’t know how to do it without scrambling the morning of the event. Then maybe I’m like, hmm, I can create a digital product that walks them step-by-step on how to make a cake a week in advance, freeze the cake, freeze the frosting, and then frost the cake the morning of. And that might be something that I hadn’t thought of unless I asked my audience what their challenges are. So I think it starts with that and then creating, it doesn’t have to be a digital product. It can be, again, a membership site where maybe you’re like every single month or week you’re connecting with your audience on a deeper level and you’re doing a cake tutorial or you’re doing some sort of tutorial that’s again solving a problem for that. Maybe you’re sending out weekly meal plans. I know a lot of us think of eBooks.

That’s a great place to start if you can’t think of anything. But there’s so much more we can do than just sending an ebook because I think a lot of people just download and then kind of forget about it, but how can we have a pulse on our audience on a more consistent basis and serve our audience on a more consistent basis? So I think again, if you look at the rise of ai, human connection is becoming more important than ever. We’re all creating it. Brands want that. We want that with our audience and monetizing your email list or creating a membership site is the best way to do that because you’re interacting with them on a consistent basis. So that’s one thought. I mean, there’s a lot of ideas on different ways, guys, but that’s

Bjork Ostrom: Great. And that would be the two examples. We talked about brand partnership, and you’re talking about almost like your own product. You are launching your own product, selling your own product. Let’s talk about it within the context of a brand partnership. So you’re going to partner with another brand, you want to come up with an offer that’s compelling. In a situation like that, would you also be polling your audience and would that be helpful as it relates to brand partnerships and working with a sponsor?

Candice Ward: Yeah, absolutely. I think so. I mean, of course that’s analytics that you can show. Okay, so here’s an example again related to my niche. I am dessert focused and it’s a little bit scary for me right now because I’m something that naturally fits into my lifestyle is also I make really healthy food for my kids. And a lot of people think as a dessert blogger that I eat really unhealthy. So I’m starting to kind of merge my real life. What do we do with my actual website and my brand? And so I’m starting to reach out to these more health conscious brands. For example, dates. I wouldn’t think of baking with dates, but I’m now having to pitch these other brands that wouldn’t be on paper that looks like it fits my

Dessert niche. So one thing that I did is I pulled my audience and I said, Hey, are you guys interested in seeing how I can use dates in a dessert recipe? And a lot of people were interested. So I can then show that data and those analytics to the brand that I’m pitching to say, Hey, my audience is actually interested in this. Even though I’m a dessert focused blog, I’m actually doing a series on 10 high protein breakfasts that are maybe kind of dessert type breakfast like pancakes or a cake or something and open up the conversation that way. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely important to be able to kind of know what your audience needs and then go and find brands that you could align with and help your audience fulfill that challenge that they’re having as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Great.

Candice Ward: So that is one aspect.

Bjork Ostrom: So around the offer a little bit more, one of the things that, a personal story from us getting into the world of brand partnerships and sponsorships, we do it both for Pinch of Yum, our Food and recipe website and Food Blogger Pro. So anybody who follows the podcast closely knows that. And for a while now there’s a season where we didn’t do ads and now we are working with brands and sponsors to have ads on the podcast. One of the things that was so obvious but super helpful for me to learn along the journey was we started out and we thought we’re going to start doing podcast ads. That was our strategy. The conversations that we’re having as a team, it was like podcast ads. As we got into it, what we realized was we are going to partner with brands to get exposure to their company, whether that be podcasts, Instagram, email, like a joint webinar, and opening up the opportunity to use all of these other platforms for us allowed us to create a much more compelling offer than just a podcast ad.

And I think about that also within the context of Pinch of Yum. One of the things that I learned, I have a friend who has a gear related site and met with somebody who does the sales for them or marketing, and we can talk about some of those a little bit. And he helped me understand the offers that they put together. They’ll talk to a brand and the brand will say, here’s our goal, here’s our initiative. And then what they do is they go back to the lab and they craft an offer for that brand using probably 10 to 15 different ways to get in front of their audience, one of which was in-person events. Another was a custom video series around this adventuring in a van. And all of that has been this reminder to me that if we are interested in partnering with brands or working with sponsors, part of what we need to do is think about how we can craft an offer that we put in front of a brand that is really compelling for the goal that they are looking to achieve.

And one last point for it until I pass back to you to hear your reflections on it, one of the thought exercises I sometimes think about is like, Hey, let’s say that traffic to Pinch of Yum didn’t grow at all. Let’s say that the following on any social platform didn’t grow at all, and we knew that was going to be true for three years. What would it look like to double the revenue that we have in the businesses without any growth? And my encouragement to anybody listening would be all of us could do that. We just need to figure out how to strategically approach it. And I think the offer is one of the ways that you do it. So as it relates to brand partnerships, can you talk about how people can craft better offers to put in front of a brand?

Candice Ward: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. First of all, it is possible. It’s absolutely possible when we’re forced to think of things outside of the box or something that we’re not conditioned to do. If we’re not conditioned to grow our blog and in that way with ad revenue, what would we do? There’s so many other opportunities out there, we just have to try. And to your point, before I answer that question, I just have to say, I recently went to an event, not in the food niche, but just a creator event. And I talked to creators in all different niches and I ask them, how are you monetizing? Because a lot of them don’t really rely on ad revenue to their website. A lot of them are doing exactly what we’re talking about today. They all are monetizing in different ways depending on where they are, seeing where their audience lives, whether that’s YouTube or podcasting or newsletters in their email.

And there’s so many different ways to do it. And I even came across a few individuals, like you said, that are hosting their own event and they’re having sponsors at the event. So it really starts with understanding one, where’s your audience outside of your website, where are they living? Where are they going? Where are they spending their time? And how can we show up there for them? And also, what is performing for us? Is it Pinterest, is it YouTube? Where else are we seeing really strong numbers that would be compelling to reach out to a brand? And so it does start with understanding what the brand’s goals are, and we need to first be able to get in front of brands to ask them that question. But typically speaking, brands are not all trying to accomplish the same thing. There’s kind of three main goals that they have in mind.

So it’s usually increased brand awareness of their brand or product. This might be like a smaller company that’s trying to compete with larger companies and they’re just launching a bunch of new products and they need to get the word out there. They might be trying to make sales actually want you to help them make sales. Those are very different goals, and your offer to them should be very different. So let me give you an example, brand awareness. Let’s say a company just launched a new flavor. Let’s say it’s a vanilla company, a vanilla extract, and they just launched a new flavor. It’s a coconut flavor. They are most likely going to care about brand awareness, meaning they want to work with influencers to get eyeballs on this new product versus let’s say they have a really, their main goal of working with influencers is to actually have sales.

They want to make more sales on their website. So what they’re probably going to care about in the campaign is link clicks. They want people to go to their website, they want people to click on the link and they want people to purchase. So maybe you’re not proposing to them doing a sponsored post on social media because social media engagement is really dicey right now. And maybe you have a really strong email list and you say to them, great, let’s do a sponsored email blast or a sponsored newsletter because people are clicking from my newsletters to external sites. And you have that analytics. That’s how you evolve your offer in a really simple way. You just by knowing and understanding what’s working in your business, where people are and how you can then leverage that to be of value to the brand

Bjork Ostrom: Based

Candice Ward: On their

Bjork Ostrom: Goals. Yeah, that’s great. Understanding the goals I think really helps then to craft the offer that you put together to a quick story and then follow up questions. One of the ways that we will try and accomplish that is if a brand ever reaches out, this would just be inbound. One of the things we try and do as quickly as possible is I’ll respond and say, because I usually handle these, Hey, would it be possible to jump on a call? And my only goal for that call is just to ask questions around a hundred different ways of asking what does success look like for you coming out of this? What would you view as a successful campaign? And a lot of times it’s for that individual, what can they take to their boss and that they know that their boss would look at it and be like, wow, this was awesome. But one of the things that you said, and this is my question for you, is you need to get in front of brands in order to even have that conversation. So let’s take it to the step before that, before you start to understand the goal of the brand to get on a call. Or if they don’t want to get on a call to trade emails back and forth to get that information, how do you even get to the point where the brand is talking to you and listening to you?

Candice Ward: Yeah, that is called pitching my friend. Yeah, it’s work and it should be part of our business process, especially if we want to have a lucrative, stable business. I incorporate pitching into my business every single week. I block off time for it and to kind of get more into the specifics of it. And what that might look like is some us are getting inbound leads, but some of us are not, and some of us never will because again, that’s that marketing piece. If we’re not getting enough eyeballs on our offer and we’re struggling there, then we’re never going to be able to convert those individuals into sales. So you can of course monetize your audience into sales that would be monetizing your email list with a digital product or a paid membership site, or you can monetize by directly reaching out to brands that you want to work with.

And I think of this as being a more proactive marketing approach versus a reactionary or passive marketing approach. Passive would be like you’re posting on social media hoping that brands find you, that’s more passive. So it really starts with finding brands that align within your niche or what it is that you’re doing. Again, it doesn’t have to be just related to our website, and I’ll give you an example in my own business and how it’s evolved. I host a charity event every single year, and it started because I was selling product, I was selling caramels in the wedding industry, and it was like my most popular recipe, most popular product. And I was like, you know what? I want to give back around the holidays. So I basically created this charity brunch and people would come and they would make caramels with me, they would take them home, and I just kind of combined the two.

Well, now it’s evolved into an opportunity for me to work with sponsors. And I say, I’m hosting this small event. I would love to share with them my favorite food items in the food industry. And so brands are now paying me to have their product gifted to my attendees. And then I create a real recap, just a video recap that showcases all the products. And I said, if you want me to do a standalone video for your product, I can, but that here’s the fee of working together for that. So I’ve turned this charity event that was not ever supposed to be something I monetized, and I just naturally evolved it into a way to monetize, but also share my favorite food products to my community. And it’s a form of marketing for them. And without batting an eyelash, these brands will send you product. But then I turn that into an easy upsell of if you want me to showcase just your product as a standalone, here’s what that fee would be for a sponsored post. And

Bjork Ostrom: That would be on your social accounts or on your site, or, yep,

Candice Ward: Exactly. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Candice Ward: So there’s so many different ways, and that’s why I just wanted to share that example. But it really does start by reaching out to a company via email or using LinkedIn to connect with them and writing a pitch that is, it has to be relevant to them, it has to build connection with the brand and it has to offer value. Those are the three components in order for a brand to really want to reply to you and kind of start that conversation. And once it’s started, that’s when you really want to get them on a call and do exactly what you had mentioned.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So would you almost view the steps in the process, like you’re starting with marketing and then you’re moving into the offer stage and then sales after that, which I want to stay in the marketing stage a little bit longer, but would you almost view that as the flow or is it like, Hey, make sure that you understand what you’re offering is so you have that ready when you do go into the process of marketing?

Candice Ward: Yeah, I think it’s important to have an offer first, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. I don’t really think. I think the flow is absolutely marketing to sales, but in terms of your offer, I think your offer could be something that it would be easier if you knew what it was before you’re marketing that, but maybe as you’re marketing what you currently already have in existence, maybe then you come up with this new idea that’s a new offer. Or maybe like we said, you pull your audience and you find out information you didn’t know and then you’re creating a new offer there.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think as I’m thinking about it, it probably is the difference between are you doing cold outreach or is it inbound? And I think if it’s inbound, what’s happening is that you’re getting on a call, you’re understanding the goals, and then you’re forming an offer. I think if you’re pitching, tell me if this feels accurate, if you’re pitching, you’re forming an offer, then you are marketing it and then you’re going into the sales process. So it’s almost like the flow of it depends on if it’s a warmly that’s coming to you inbound or a cold outreach to a brand. So one of the things that you said that I think was interesting is you said you’re blocking off time every week to pitch what is your pitching process? What does that time look like?

Candice Ward: Yeah, it’s going to be different for everybody. So what I do for my business is about I block off about an hour a week and my process looks like creating a list of maybe 10 to 15 brands to reach out to for a given month. And the reason I say that is because the power is really in the follow up. So I follow a four to five email sequence, meaning I will pitch the same brands once a week for four weeks to keep it really simplified and that ensures that I’m actually following up. I think what a lot of people do when they start reaching out to brands is they’re just blasting as many emails as possible and then they’re not really able to follow up at all. And the power really is in the follow up. 80% of responses happen at email three. So majority though, majority of people stop after one or two emails.

Bjork Ostrom: So

Candice Ward: If you are emailing more than one or two times, you are already a step ahead and you’re more likely to stand out to the brand. So that’s why I follow a four week email sequence, 10 to 15 brands max so that I can continue the follow up without it being too overwhelming. And it starts with really coming up with a list of brands that I one want to work with or I get really strategic and I look at, there’s a lot of different ways on finding qualified brands. I leverage LinkedIn and I will follow companies on LinkedIn and then I can see

Bjork Ostrom: The company page or individuals?

Candice Ward: Both.

Bjork Ostrom: Both.

Candice Ward: So I will either at a bare minimum follow the company’s page because you can see updates. So if they’ve posted anything about a new product launching, I’ll give you an example, milk, it’s like nut free or not nut free, it’s dairy free. It’s a milk alternative brand, and they’re kind of everywhere right now. And they just launched in Costco and they just launched a new flavor, I think it’s coconut now. They started out as, I want to say almond or cashew milk. But my point is I knew this information because I followed them on LinkedIn and I saw that they were launching, they were teasing the launch of their new product. So what I was doing, I was emailing them during that tease and I said, do you need to work with food influencers to get the word out about these new products? So a lot of it is like you have to reach out to them at the right time, and this increases your chances of the timing being perfect for them if you know what is happening from a marketing perspective at the company. And LinkedIn is without a doubt, the quickest way you’re going to get that information. I feel like LinkedIn is kind of the starting point and then they’ll start, all the marketing material will go onto social media once it’s the launch has happened.

And then I will connect with marketing individuals too on LinkedIn or the decision maker directly from there.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So a couple follow up questions on that. This is all super helpful. What are you using to track the process of sending out those emails to the 10 to 15 companies? Is there a software tool you use?

Candice Ward: I don’t use anything. I think if you’re emailing more than that, there are softwares that you can use, but I don’t because I try to keep my process so simple that I don’t need a software tool. I have an Excel sheet that has all of my contacts that I’ve either sourced or worked with in the past. And then I will add the new contacts once I find them to that I just use, honestly, I go to my sent box and I just reply to the last email that I sent them. So that’s why.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s like you kind of know who these people are and you have this time blocked off and you can go in and find those contacts. Yep.

Candice Ward: Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And

Candice Ward: You can also schedule the, I know a lot of people will schedule the email, so if they send one email, they might have a follow-up, but I like to not schedule it. I want to see are they going to reply? And then my response will be different depending on if they reply. And I have templates that I’ve built out and that I use. So it makes the process really easy. The most time consuming part is really the initial email that you’re writing because you want it to be, again, relevant to what the brand has going on in their business and you want it to build a connection with them and also offer value. So I will offer specific ideas that I’m pitching. So back to your question about the offer, I do kind of put in my thoughts or what that offer is in that initial email, and maybe that’s not something that will help them right now, but it at least gets the idea going and it’s not as though they’re going to shut the door just because you pitch them on an idea that they may not need. Now I think if anything, they’re going to appreciate that you said, okay, I think this could impact your marketing and enhance it. And here are my thoughts more as a consultant rather than I’m selling you on something

Is a really critical point too.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. A couple email tools that I’ve used before, if people would want to look into ’em, the email service client that I use is called Superhuman. And one of the things that’s really cool that you can do within that is you can add a tag that says, remind me if this person hasn’t followed up in a week, and then it puts it back into my inbox. And then Mixmax is one you can use within Gmail that does a similar thing if people wanted to get techie about it. But one of the things that I’ve learned in having conversations with a lot of people is it’s not the tool that does it. It’s you making the time and creating the process and following it. It’s like putting it on your calendar and actually doing it, which is what I love about what you’re saying. So with these emails, are you essentially trying to, what are you trying to do? What is the goal of these four to five emails that you are sending?

Candice Ward: Yeah, I love this question because I think a lot of us think the goal is to get a yes or the goal is to get them to say, yes, I want to work with you. That’s not the goal at all. The goal is to make a connection with the brand. So when they have a need, they think of you. The goal is to show a genuine interest in the company and the brand and to show that you are of value to them. And the goal is to get them to reply. The reply might look different depending on what they need. You might get a reply that says, we don’t have anything right now. And that’s not a personal jab to you. They truly might not. And there are strategies to be able to build on that connection so that when the timing is right, they think of you and they reach out to you or you’re reaching out to them when that timing is right.

So that is the number one goal is to get them to reply to you. So every email has a different goal in my four email sequence, and the first email is absolutely the most important. And the way I also like to just want to mention, I like to think of pitching as it’s not sending emails. That is part of pitching. Pitching is building a connection with a brand, building a business relationship and partnership. And there’s so many different ways to do that. And to add on to supplement to the email. So for example, my process might look like this. I send an email to 10 brands week one, and then week two I might send a follow-up email, and then I might also go and connect with that person on LinkedIn and send them a personal note on LinkedIn and follow their company page and maybe interact with them on LinkedIn. And then I might go to social media and do the same. So we’re really making all of these tiny interactions with brands and connecting these dots, and then it turns into eventually they have a need. Eventually they’ll have a need and they’ll think of you. And then that might turn into, okay, let’s talk now. Let’s get to that point where let’s have a conversation.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think that the more anytime you are entering into any relationship business or personal, it gets easier the more and trust somebody. And I think sometimes we forget about that and we think it’s transactional when it’s actually probably more relational and there’s an individual on the other side, and if it’s a cold email out of the blue, there’s ways that that can evolve into something that somebody would know and trust you. But as you have these little micro interactions, my guess is if done that, it increases your likelihood of that person knowing you, trusting you, liking you. A lot of the deals for Pinch of Yum that we, or the relationships that we have that form into deals or partnerships come from Lindsay starting by just organically mentioning the product with no expectation. It’s just like, Hey, I use this product, I like this product.

There’s a mention. And oftentimes that will kick off a conversation. If not that, then it probably makes it easier. If there ever was a time down the line where we did reach out and it’s like, oh, there’s some familiarity there, and there’s all these different ways that we can become more familiar to the individuals and the brands that we work with. So I love that as a point. It’s like the goal isn’t to do the deal. The goal is to establish this relationship and establish a connection and to build that relationship. So that’s all under this category of marketing, the subcategory of pitching, pitching kind of equaling building the relationship with these brands. Talk about sales, because I think sometimes people think sales and marketing are kind of the same thing, but you’re intentionally saying, no, this is something different. What is sales and how does that fit in?

Candice Ward: Yeah, they’re very different. Marketing is getting more eyeballs on your offer so they can see it. And then sales is turning those eyeballs into money, actually getting them to buy. So when we’re reaching out to brands, that is a form of marketing. But then once you initiate that conversation, that turns into a sales conversation, how do you turn it into a partnership? How do you turn it into a mutually beneficial partnership where not only you are making what you’re worth? Because that’s the other challenge is sometimes these brands don’t want to pay you what your rates are. And that’s a totally different topic, but how do you turn your email list into somebody who’s going to purchase your digital product that’s sales and actually not convincing, but creating something that’s so compelling that they want to either work with you or hit purchase or say yes to hiring you. That’s the sales component, and that is part of pitching. Pitching is kind of like a form of marketing, but then again, once they show interest, that’s when it turns into sales. At that point,

Bjork Ostrom: What would your advice be to people who feel like I’m not good at sales? They can craft within their own computer and their own time and offer and put that together and even can maybe reach out to brands and say, I’m interested in working together, love the product. Let me know if you’d ever want a partner. But then once it gets to the point of taking that offer, putting it into a PDF and putting some price points to it and then saying, here’s what I am asking. If you want to work together, if that’s something that’s scary for people, number one, how do you come up with those price points? It’s like the question that people always have. And then number two, how, how can we build confidence in that process as we’re starting to work with brands?

Candice Ward: Yeah, confidence is a huge piece of it. And the way I like to explain sales to people. I mean, I wasn’t good at sales when I got my first corporate job in sales, but I learned by doing it. And it’s a muscle that has to be flexed just like anything else that we do in our business. I mean, if you think back to when anyone started their business, no one knew what they were doing. You don’t know what you’re doing when you start. And it’s similar with sales, but I think it’s so much scarier because a lot of us tie it to if they say, no, we think it’s personal, or if we don’t charge the right amount, is this job going to feel good to us if we undercharged or if they underpay us or we feel like we’re charging too much and we’re afraid that the deal’s not going to go through.

So a lot of it is a confidence overcoming those fears and then building that confidence by doing, by practicing. And that’s why my philosophy and what I am so passionate about teaching food creators is that it doesn’t have to be this thing that you add to your business that’s so overwhelming that takes up all your time and then doesn’t turn into anything. That’s the last thing I want for people. But that’s often what happens when people start pitching on their own. They try, it doesn’t turn into anything, and then they say it doesn’t work. They feel rejected and it doesn’t feel good. So my advice would be learn to sell yourself. Go read books, hire a coach, talk to other people who have done it. But it is something you have to actively practice in order for it to become. It’s second nature to me at this point, because I’ve done it for so long. But my favorite thing is when I’m in a group coaching program and I’m actually helping people close deals, because I’ve built this intuition almost because I’ve done it so long and I’ve seen so many deals, and I also was in different industries, and I see commonalities now between every opportunity. It really comes down to four main objections or reasons why the brand might not hire you. And I know how to almost think a lawyer and think, how do I proactively come up with a way to overcome that?

Bjork Ostrom: What are those four? Do you know ’em off the top of your head?

Candice Ward: So the main four is going, I mean, the most common we’ve come across as budget,

Lack of need. So this would be for cold outreach, not inbound leads. They obviously have a need, that’s why they’re reaching out to you. But for cold outreach, it would be maybe they don’t have a need right now, so need budget, competing priorities, meaning they typically have other initiatives that they’re focused on and they can’t focus on what you’re pitching to them. And then the fourth one is, why would they hire you over somebody else? You have to convince them that you are the person for the job. So those are kind of the four things that need to align in order for a partnership to be like, okay, great. This is viable.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And what you’re saying is over time, we don’t have time to go into all of these, but over time, you’ve developed the tool in your tool belt to respond to those. If somebody’s like, ah, we just don’t really have a, maybe you could use budget as an example. Oh, it’s not really in our budget right now. What is your response to that? Usually

Candice Ward: My response is, what is a budget range that would be feasible for you? I would love to create a custom package that would fit your budgets, and it maybe isn’t something that you originally thought of as a way to partner. And that’s why it’s so important to, again, we’ve talked about know their goals because maybe their goal is link clicks, but they don’t have budget for a sponsored Instagram post and an email newsletter. But maybe you’re like, Hey, you’re going to get more bang for your buck and see better results just by doing an email blast with me. And that’s where you come as a consultant and you can offer different packages that align with their budget. That’s great. And that’s how you win more opportunities. And that’s what negotiating really. That’s negotiations right there.

Bjork Ostrom: And then what about pricing? What’s your advice for people on how, if they haven’t done it before and they feel like they don’t know what to do, how do you come up with the first price points for your packages?

Candice Ward: Yeah, that’s the trickiest part for all of us,

Bjork Ostrom: And we have three minutes.

Candice Ward: The best way to figure out pricing, if you’ve never done it before, I would say the first thing you need to do is come up with how long this job is going to take. You figure out what your hourly rate should be based on your experience and pitch that, and then add 30% for taxes. But that would be a good starting point. And then you learn, did that take me longer? Did that price feel good after I did the job? And we learned from that. And then there’s all these formulas that I could go into to help you really calculate what that number is. But that’s a good starting point

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s so individual as well. And the multiplier obviously becomes as you gain your following, as you have more attention, that’s more valuable for the brand, willing to pay more. But the individual piece especially is like, man, if there’s a brand that we’re excited to work with, or on the opposite side, if we think that it might be a difficult relationship, not because we don’t feel like the brand is a good fit, but maybe it’s like, man, we know that in working with this partnership, they’re really specific about exactly how the photos look and requesting reshoots and things like that. There might be a level of effort that’s higher that will say, what’s our personal threshold for wanting to do this? And I know some people who just really don’t like the idea of doing branded partnerships just because they don’t like that as a workflow, and so they have a rate, but it’s just ridiculously expensive.

And then if somebody says yes, then they’re like, okay, I’ll do it. For other people, you might be early stages. You want to build your portfolio, and so you’re willing to not get what you eventually want to get, but just to build your portfolio, you start there. I think the one thing I would say within all of it is just increase over time. Slowly bump that up is you get more comfortable and it’s okay in the early stages if you’re selling yourself short a little bit, as long as you close that gap eventually. So to not feel like you need to perfect it right away, but we all start that way. Yeah,

Candice Ward: We all start that way and then that’s how you learn. I mean, that’s how everybody learns and everyone’s numbers are going to be different, but it is more important to get the experience work with brands, and then you can say, I’ve worked with these brands. It’s way easier to land brand deals after you’ve done that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. We are short on time. We could go for another hour on this stuff because there’s so much here to talk about, but the good news is for people who really want to go deep, you have a course where you go over this. And the great thing is with that, I was looking through some really great testimonials as well of people who have gone through, had success with it. And the thing that I was thinking about when you’re like, it’s a skill you need to practice, you need to do it. I often think of the skill of learning an instrument, and if we’re getting up on stage and performing flute and it’s the first time we’ve picked up a flute, we have zero expectation that we’re going to be good at it. But for some reason, I think within the context of some of these skills like sales, we expect ourselves to be better.

But it takes time and it takes repetition and it takes learning from experts. Like if you’re going to learn the flute, you probably are going to hire somebody who’s been playing flute for 10 years. You’re going to learn from watching people who have played flute, learning from them, listening from them having a coach. And so I think it’s justification, especially within the context of business for us to really place a priority on learning and learning from people who have done it before to fast track our growth. So it’s just a little bit of a plug for your course and your expertise. So talk a little bit about that if people want to learn more about it and they can access the link in the show notes as well.

Candice Ward: Sure. Yeah. I have my course that’s available anytime called the Confident Pitch Program, and that’s essentially my pitching basics. It goes through my entire six step sales process, my workflow, how to actually build this pitching process that you can stick to that’s not overwhelming, and there’s a bunch of templates in there. Then I have other coaching programs where we actually do it together. So I’m doing one this summer where we do it, we do the whole process, but it’s me doing it with you. So yeah, it’s really my philosophy is I want people to be able to flex this muscle and to feel confident being able to then go and do it on their own, but also feel equipped to handle any situation that comes your way because every situation is a little bit different and the nuances are different, but once you start doing it to really realize I’m not selling them anything, I’m actually offering them something.

I’m offering the brand something. There’s a lot of mindset shifts I think that start before you start pitching or reaching out to brands. But really the whole philosophy and what I teach is you can pitch fewer brands and still make sales and see massive results and get more time back to go back to being creative and not feel like you have to spend all your time selling and you’re simultaneously learning the skill that really pays dividends. I mean, you will use sales skills. It’s transferable in all aspects of your life, but also as your business scales, you can use it to scale your business. It’s not something that you use once and it goes away.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Yeah, we’ll link to that in show notes. Great resource. Candace, thanks so much for coming on. Again, if people want to learn more about your story, we didn’t talk a lot about that today. They can check out the other podcast that you’ve done, so we’ll link to that as well, but really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise.

Candice Ward: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.

Emily Walker: Hey, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in Today. I wanted to chat a little bit more about one of the perks of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you likely already know about these, but maybe you’re a new member or you’re thinking about becoming a member, and I just wanted to let you know about one of my favorite things in the membership. Every month we host a live q and a over Zoom with an industry expert and usually Bjork. They chat about topics ranging from republishing content to Google, algorithm updates, Pinterest or advanced SEO. Sometimes we’ll do an Ask Bjork anything or even questions about creating content plugins, site speed. Really, we cover every topic you might need to know something about As a food creator, as a Food Blogger Pro member, you’re given the option to submit questions in advance or you can submit questions during the live q and a and the guest in Bjork will answer your questions and provide feedback.

It’s always a really awesome opportunity to get advice and feedback from experts in the Food creator community, and it’s just a really fun way to connect as members and get to know each other better these Q and as are hosted live. But we always post replays on our site and for our members only podcast if you can’t make it live. So anyways, it’s just a really great feature of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you aren’t yet a member, and this sounds like something you would like access to, head to food blogger pro.com/membership to learn more. And that’s it for this week. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Make it a great week.